


you love me (as much as someone like me can love anyone)

by bramblePatch



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Chucklevoodoos, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Dream Bubbles, Drug Use, F/F, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Mind Control, Mind Games, Mind Manipulation, Mind Reading, Multi, Partial Mind Control, dubiously consensual polyamory, manipul8ion, questionably Vriskagram-compliant, references to past murder, spider trolls bein' spider trolls, we'll just chalk that up to Vriska being a super unreliable narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-10
Updated: 2017-07-10
Packaged: 2018-11-30 14:01:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11465064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bramblePatch/pseuds/bramblePatch
Summary: Facing a three-year meteor journey, a bunch of people with no good reason leftnotto trust her (right?), and more dream bubbles than you can shake a stick at, naturally Vriska is going to surround herself with as much support as possible. After all, it's better to love and care for each other than to just... wallow, right? It's better this way.Anyway, it's what she wants.





	you love me (as much as someone like me can love anyone)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [oriflamme](https://archiveofourown.org/users/oriflamme/gifts).



_You are three sweeps old, and you have a new friend._

_She is a bit warmer than you, with pointed horns and pointed teeth and a pointed gaze, and a pointed sense of justice. She doesn't go out of her way to cull people who play by the rules, and you count yourself lucky that you did not choose to cheat today. The loss rankles, of course, and you are not certain what you are going to feed your lusus, but you can stay out a few more nights before the spider becomes restive. Plenty of time to find something - someone - else._

_For the moment, you perch warily on the branch next to her, outside her hive, gingerly feeling the tender spot on your jaw -_

_(That's not right, Terezi hit you in the ribs in that first bout...)_

_\- and she comes along and sits down beside you, as comfortable on the broad tree limb as she is on the ground. In her hand are two bright red popsicles, and she hands one to you, before plunking down with a broad grin. "Good game," she says brightly. "You almost got me."_

_"You don't gotta make me feel better," you grump, but you take the popsicle and gnaw distractedly at the corner. Cherry-flavored._

_"You know, it always drove me crazy you thought I was going easy on you,” she says, and her voice is different, older, sadder, and you look up sharply, getting a glimpse of streaky teal blood and eyes that are dead, not damaged, before the dream bubble abruptly dissolves around you -_

 

Someone's dragged you inside and laid you on your side, wings carefully unfurled behind you. Your head is pounding, not just the sore jaw that your dreamself knew ought to be there, but a sick dizzy ache that ricochets from your horns to your temples to the base of your skull to the backs of your eyes and then starts over again. Probably concussed, you figure, but if you move slow you can manage. You're pretty certain you didn't die. If you'd died, the concussion would be gone by now.

You venture deeper into the meteor, and it’s a long while before you find anyone else. It doesn’t seem like it should be so long. Your luck ought to make it easy to turn the right corners and find the right corridors, but where there should be a warm glow of borrowed fortune in the pit of your stomach, there’s nothing but a hard, cold sensation. It’s not unfamiliar, but you’ve only felt it a few times in the past and only recently have you been able to do anything to replenish it. But once you stop trying to feel the right thing to do and start actually paying attention, it’s not long before you start recognizing passages by memory, not instinct, and wind your way in to the little complex of blocks where everyone had already begun to settle in to wait for the end when you’d taken matters into – tried to take matters into your own graspprongs.

A few of the others are now stripping down the computer lab in what looks a great deal like a salvage operation. A very few. You grip the doorframe, suddenly dizzy again, and when no one notices your entrance, you speak up, peevishly. “Where _is_ everyone?”

Terezi resolutely ignores you and keeps doing whatever fiddly thing she’s doing.

Kanaya looks up, something startled and almost guilty in her faintly glowing face.

Karkat scows, and immediately starts counting people off on his fingers.

“Answering dumb questions, supposedly alive but not here, _fucking dead, you asshole_ ,” he begins, and you’re pretty certain that means he’s listing everyone in hemospectral order, “liquified his sponge _again_ , dead, over there looking at you like a landed fish, over _there_ trying to pretend she has nothing to do with any of this, standing on the liminal platform asking dumb questions, dead, fucked off somewhere to sleep off everything he chooses to do and be, dead, dead.”

“Oh.” The implicit accusation – you’re not certain any of them can or want to prove you killed Tavros, but you don’t much care, not at the moment, not with these three anyway – gets swept away in the blunt list of all the other casualties. Some of them you’d known about. Some are news to you. You’re a little surprised to find that you actually care that something’s happened to Equius – but then, you’d been friends, as much as the two of you could be friends, practically since pupation. You don’t know that you’d liked him much, but he’d been useful and he’d been... steady.

There’s not much stability in your life.

You’re abruptly aware of how much stability’s not in your life and you’re very carefully not looking at Kanaya but you _want_ her, you want _something, someone_ familiar from before all this, before SGRUB ruined your life and your teammates ruined your life and you ruined your life -

(It’s a reflex, you’re almost totally certain you didn’t mean to mentally reach for her, and anyway you were so clumsy about it that you’re pretty sure it wouldn’t have done anything if she wasn’t already sympathetic...)

\- strong, cool fingers fold around yours, and you look up to find Kanaya at your side, a little awkward, entirely sincere. “There are still a few of us, though,” she says. You’re not sure what the two of you are to each other anymore, but you cling to her hand anyway, you can sort that out later.

Terezi continues to pretend you’re not there.

 

In the time it takes you to reach the Green Sun, Karkat and Kanaya fill you in, more or less. There’s still things you don’t understand – where have most of the corpses gone? _Why_ are two of the humans waiting for you at the Green Sun? - but you’re starting to pick up enough ambient luck to vaguely, vaguely feel that they’ve got the right of it, so you don’t make too much fuss.

 

_Bright season evenings are short, and only marginally cooler than the day; travel is foolhardy this time of the sweep, but you’re now very nearly five sweeps and your lusus is still growing. When you’ve only got a couple of safe hours to be outside, there’s no way you can get enough trolls to feed her; this time of the sweep, both your lusus and Feferi’s make do with less rarefied prey._

_The perky greenblood your neighbor has been paledating has come to stay with him for the season, and she’s an impressive huntress; you know Equius doesn’t really like the thought of anyone hunting, but he’s got enough grace to look the other way as Nepeta helps you drag a herdbeast down the canyon and toss it into the webs._

_“I don’t know what’s going on with me and Kanaya anymore,” you say, because she’s easy to talk and you aren’t old enough to be completely cautious. And although some part of your thinkpan is sure that’s all you say, all you have context to say in this place and time, you find yourself adding, “Or me and Terezi.”_

_Nepeta giggles, and as you look across the lightly furred carcass at her, her eyes flash white and ghostly. “I don’t think you’re supurrsed to know,” she says, and it’s not what she’d said the first time around; before she’d been giddy with a new moirallegiance herself, and pushed you to pursue a palemance with Kanaya. “Not for certain. If you spend too much time pawsing to reason things out, you stop trusting yourself, you know?”_

_“It’s not me that doesn't trust me,” you object,_ mostly _certain what you’re talking about now, and when. “She’s closed herself off! She hasn’t talked to me in_ days _!”_

_“It’s not her job to trust you, Whiskers,” Nepeta says, with a hissing laugh. “You’ve got to meet her at_ least _half-way. Maybe more.”_

_“That’s not fair!” you whine, and the ghost of Nepeta gives a little tilt of her horns which indicates, you’re pretty sure, that if her eyes weren’t solid white she’d be rolling them right now._

_“Since when do you care about_ fur _?”_

_You don’t have a retort, at least not before -_

\- someone is shaking you awake, and you roll over quickly, fingers around closing around your dice before you come full awake and see it’s just Karkat.

“We’re closing in on the Green Sun, weirdo,” he informs you, and turns to go.

 

You aren’t certain what you expected of the humans, but it’s not this, and they’re enough to put thoughts of Terezi’s neglect out of your mind for the moment.

Of course, you’d seen Rose and Dave before, through a computer; you knew they were more or less trolloid, hornless, with hair and skin in variations of pale earth tones. But you hadn’t had the scale to know that Rose stands over you by nearly a full head (with Dave only slightly shorter). She’s soft-featured and broad-hipped and light on her feet for her size.

Newly god-tiered, she’s also quite literally Light on her feet, in a way the Alternian language doesn’t quite have words to describe. But you’re a fellow Goddess of Light, and if you can’t quite express it, you can still sense that your shared Aspect pools and flows around her in a way totally unlike the way it drains into and overflows you. You siphon a bit off just by being near her; you don’t think she notices.

You’re well aware of the way Kanaya looks at her, and the way she looks back at Kanaya, and you are jealous but you are not at all sure who you are jealous of. You’ll sort it out eventually, you tell yourself, and if you’re keeping a light mental touch on Kanaya’s desires, you tell yourself that it’s just for your own reassurance.

Rose is harder to read – both the humans are, almost-familiar drives and emotions tangled up in ideals of family and community, justice and heroism that you can’t quite track to troll equivalents. It’s little wonder that from a distance, you’ve never been able to do much with humans other than shut them down by brute force.

You don’t have a lot of desire to shut Rose down, you find.

 

_You’re not exactly sure when this is._

_Or maybe it just isn’t, maybe it’s a scrap of landscape built from what happy memories you have but without any particular events attached, because as you swing in the upper cables of your lusus’s web, taking absent care not to stray close to anything sticky, you know no one else ever came up quite this far with you._

_And you’re not alone now, you know somehow even before you turn your head and see her; at first you think she’s a doomed you. She’s got your horns and your sign on the front of her dress, and she has very nearly your face. But she’s older than you, by a couple of sweeps at least, and you know that at this point you’re the oldest of the Vriskas. Some of the nuances of timeline tracking and maintenance elude you, but you_ know _no other permutation of you has survived this long. And you can’t imagine why one of you would be wearing Karkat’s weird sign on a necklace._

_She sees you studying her in confusion, and she smiles – her teeth are like yours, too. “You’re confused,” she observes,. “It’s ok, Vriska. My name’s Aranea. I think you’ll know me better as Marquise Mindfang, however. It’s a good name! I’m glad my alternate had so much flair.”_

_“No wayt,” you say, and in your excitement your quirk lies heavy in your voice. There’s something indulgent in her smile, and you want to ask a million questions, but your tongue suddenly feels like lead, and there’s just a hint of a foggy, cottony feeling at the bases of your horns._

_“I’m very sorry,” she says, “I wouldn’t usually manipulate you so clumsily, I hope you can understand that! But I’m not certain how stable this bubble is. You’re probably going to wake soon, and I don’t want us to waste time on questions based on wrong assumptions...”_

_By the time you wake, she’s corrected a great many of your assumptions, and a few of the finer points of your psychic technique, and you are almost too fascinated to remember to be annoyed with her._

 

There is not a great deal to do on the meteor, cooped up with a handful of other adolescents; maybe it’s inevitable that people would start using the alchemiters to produce recreational substances. You don’t particularly care, at first; as a kid, you experimented occasionally, but anything that gave you a high also fucked with your extrasensory abilities, and some of them made it damn hard to keep your mind to yourself, and you don’t need that.

Karkat knows better what can be safely experimented with than you do, as far as trolls go; you know that after Gamzee (still in hiding, and you hope he stays there), the mutant is especially jumpy about what can be used safely, and when it comes down to it, you pretty much trust him when he grumpily degrees something safe to mess around with.

Terezi’s fructose tolerance is still for shit, just as it always has been. She glares blindly in your direction from behind her shades when she hears you sigh, but you notice she doesn’t reach for a third bottle of soda.

Dreamash no longer has any effect on Kanaya, and she pouts when she finds this out, perfect fangs catching on her lower lip. No one else has ever had any taste for the stuff, and it’s weirdly grist intensive, so no one bothers making any more.

The humans have their own recreationals – small doses of caffeine for energy and mental sharpness, something called cannabis which Dave attempts to smoke once and then swears up and down that he must have messed up the alchemy formula. And beverages with small but noticeable amounts of ethyl alcohol.

Now, you _know_ what addiction feels like in another person’s mind; your lusus didn’t mind the taste of most of the drugs available among kids on Alternia, and a junkie is low-hanging fruit in a Flarp match. And Rose isn’t an addict – but she’s not _not_ an addict, either. If you couldn’t tell she was headed that way by the fact that she starts reaching for the bottle when she’s stressed or bored, well – you’re still spending a lot of time idly picking at the outer edges of her mind, trying to figure humans out, and if the chemistry isn’t the same, the psychological imprint is almost exactly what you’d find in a troll dependent on syrup or hot ash or the more stable forms of sopor.

It’s none of your business – except that she and Kanaya are spending a lot of time together. And Kanaya is yours, but it’s a weird kind of yours where you’re not sure which quadrant it is, and you’re fairly sure she’s also Rose’s, and you kind of want Rose to be yours, too.

 

_With practice, it’s getting easier to break the context of a memory in the dreambubbles; you can do it almost every time now, without someone else shaking you out of it. You’ve gone wandering tonight, you’ve found your way out of your own memories, and you’re not entirely sure whether you’re looking for your dancestor or not. On the other hand, she’s got a lot more practice navigating than you; when she wants to be found, she turns up quickly._

_There’s no sign of her tonight. Frustrating._

_This bubble is full of trees; blue- and red-foliaged Alternian temperate forests under pink and green moonlight, which slowly give way to deep-green spires under a single white moon._

_The forest opens up at the banks of a frothing river, and high above perches Rose’s hive – blocky and modular enough that if you didn’t know better you might almost think it a_ real _hive. You’ve seen it on computer screens enough times to identify it._

_You spread your wings and fly up, to the flat expanse of roof over the waterfall. There’s a blanket spread on the white roof; as you approach, Rose looks up with mild interest, and Terezi jolts herself awake and flickers out of your view._

_Rose sighs, and waves you over. You pause, a little awkwardly, at the edge of the blanket._

_“I don’t suppose you know what her problem is,” you ask, looking at the spot that Terezi has just disappeared from._

_“I wish I did,” Rose admits. She folds her hands over the notebook in her lap; what you can see of it is full of dense purple handwriting and spidery charts. You can’t imagine that she has any way to bring it into the waking world. “I keep having to make course corrections around something ontological I can’t figure out, but some choice she made is right in the middle of it.”_

_“Terezi wouldn’t sabotage us,” you object, and you wish you were as confident of that as you try to sound. It’s not that she’s above scheming – honestly, she can handily keep up with you in that department, is usually two steps ahead. You can’t help but find it worrying when you can’t see what direction those steps are in. But to be truly working against the group, she’d have to feel that the strategy you’ve agreed on was indefensible. Terezi Pyrope is many things, but petty is not one of them._

_“I don’t think she is,” Rose agrees, and you feel dumb and disloyal for entertaining doubts. You’ve still got the doubts, you just... feel silly and guilty about them. “I think it’s just something she’s playing close to the vest. I can keep correcting our course, but something she did, or didn’t do, it’s displaced us a little in paradox space, and I can’t figure it out.”_

_You wonder if she would have an easier time figuring it out if she wasn’t intoxicated so often, but you aren’t quite ready to say anything about that, so you don’t._

 

You corner Dave before you confront Rose; he’s easier to get alone, less apt to disappear into the depths of the meteor when not actively interacting with someone else.

He’s fussing with that ridiculous Can Town he and the carapace have been building, when you find him, and you plant one red-booted foot carefully at the apex of a pyramid of cans to get his attention. He’s a little hard to read behind his dark glasses, and that makes you a little nervous, because you’re still not sure whether it’s a coincidence or not that people who opt for obfuscating eye wear also tend to be people you have difficulty influencing. Humans in general are hard enough to get your hooks in, although the pointers Aranea has given you over the past few months certainly help.

“I really hope you’re not gearing up to get your godzilla on,” he says, just a little too warily for it to really be dry. You’re not certain you get the reference, but you don’t really care.

“How long’s Rose had that ethanol problem?” you ask. You watch him carefully; at this distance, you can see his eyes narrow a little behind the dark lenses, can see the slightest twitch of a frown on his carefully stoic mouth.

“Why do you care?” he asks, finally.

You pout theatrically, step back and drop into a crosslegged seat on the floor – without knocking over any of his dumb can buildings, thank you very much! - and let your wings droop behind you. You love your wings. They’re so expressive.

“I care because I _care_ , Daaaaaaaave,” you whine, carefully trying to feel out the workings of his alien thinkpan, to find the impulses that might help and push them along. You’re not sure you’re getting anywhere with that, though, and again: he’s an alien, with an alien brain. Even though you’re much better with the fiddly stuff than you were when you left your session’s Medium, you still don’t have anywhere near Aranea’s level of finesse. You might just have to rely on your winning personality, here. “I want to be her friend! I want to be both of your friend. But it’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s drugging themself silly all the time, and I’m _worried_ about her.”

“It’s just alcohol,” he hedges, and you sigh heavily, and he frowns openly this time. “Ok, so yeah, she’s too young to drink this much, probably, I don’t know what god-tiering did to our brain chemistry exactly.”

“She’s got a problem,” you say flatly.

“I shouldn’t even have said anything about underage drinking parties,” he admits. “I was joking, you know. But her mom drank a lot.”

You push yourself to your feet; you’ve got the information you need, the justification for what you wanted to do anyway. Rose needs to be saved from herself. And it’s not like it’s _her_ fault; genetic predisposition is a powerful force, and as for the rest...

“You shouldn’t have said it,” you agree, already turning to leave. “You’re not a very good friend, are you, Dave?”

And in a flurry of pixie dust you’re out, down the corridor, through a transportalizer before he has an opportunity to respond.

 

Rose is hanging out in the big block you all use as an all-purpose social center, and you are not entirely sure whether you can actually smell the alcohol in Rose’s glass or if it would just be super satisfying if you _could_.

You don’t want Kanaya meddling in how you’ve planned to handle this, but you do need her to see it; you know the feel of her mind by now, and it’s easy enough to find her and plant a desire to come looking for Rose. Of course, if she reacts poorly, she’ll ruin it all, and it will come out far worse than if she just hadn’t known it was happening, so you wrap her mind up carefully in yours, just as Aranea has explained it to you. She’ll be able to react, of course. It’s just that you’ll have veto power on her reactions.

Then you storm in and slap the glass out of Rose’s hand.

“What the _fuck_?” the human spits, hand twitching toward her sylladex’s interface, and you know she’s reaching for her strife deck. You stop that, stop her from reaching, you’re good enough now to interfere with motor functions in humans without just putting them to sleep.

You hadn’t been quite sure you’d be able to hold onto both of them _and_ put on the act you need to, but now you’re in the moment, and it’s easy, it’s not even hardly an act. You don’t know if you’re actually tearing up, but it feels like you are, and if you are, all the better. “You’re intentionally poisoning yourself, Rose,” you point out, and her lilac eyes widen, then narrow. There’s a sharp intake of breath from Kanaya, behind you, a slightly brighter glow to her skin – worry and shock to hear Rose’s problem put in such stark terms, not anger at you, so you allow it. “Are we not supposed to notice that?”

Rose is pulling against your psychic hold on her arm, and she glares at you, but you’re not the naïve little kid who expects people to thank you for making hard choices anymore. You push her hand down to her side, and she’s shaking a little. You’re not certain if it’s with exertion, trying to fight you, or with emotion, or what.

“It’s none of your business,” she says, and then, “It’s just wine.”

“It is our business if we have to watch,” Kanaya says – with a little nudge from you, maybe, to say it out loud, but the sentiment is hers. Now that she’s said it you’re satisfied that she’s going to follow your play on this, and you release your grip on her mind to focus on Rose.

“We’re _worried_ about you,” you add, and you guide her back down into her seat. Kanaya’s input has shaken her a little, and her anger is starting to fade; as it does, you can find the curves of her mind more easily, sink into them as she begins to calm down and speed along the process. You don’t think your voice has ever been one that can be accurately described as _soothing_ , your speech is too sharp and venomous and changeable, but while you speak it’s keeping her focused on you and not on her own thoughts and maybe that’s just as good. “We need you in good shape! And we – Kanaya and me, anyway, probably Terezi and the boys too – we like you.”

Kanaya drops liquidly to sit at Rose’s side, and takes one of Rose’s hands in both of hers – the jadeblood has always been graceful, but there’s something preternatural about it since her transformation, and you’d almost be frightened if you weren’t so sure that she was yours. You note with some interest that Rose doesn’t seem to read her movements as predatory the way a troll would; from your current vantage point, you’re pretty sure you’d know if she was troubled to be in the grasp of a rainbow-drinker.

“We can help, if you want us to,” Kanaya murmurs, almost too low for you to hear. She looks up at you, makes a little beckoning motion with a toss of her horns; well, Kanaya can’t make people change, but she’s better at not needing to than you are, and you can follow her lead occasionally. You fold yourself in at Rose’s other side, take hold of her other hand.

Rose is conflicted, you can feel it, can almost work loose the desires you need to manipulate to get her on the right track.

“Also? You don’t get to break Kanaya’s heart,” you add, matter of factly.

Finally, she unravels, and you find the bits you need and twist them just right, and Rose nods. “I’ll try,” she says.

 

_You hang by your knees from a rope bridge that spans, not your own Land’s seas, but the luminescent waters of Rays and Frogs._

_“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Kanaya says, and you pull yourself back up onto the planks, setting the whole bridge swinging._

_“I can fly,” you point out, “and I’m pretty sure we can’t actually get hurt in the dream bubbles. Not when we’re just dreaming, not for real.”_

_“Still,” she says, and lapses into silence for a long moment._

_You lean back, looking up; the sky is Maps and Treasure’s, and the rays of blue light play oddly against the compass roses and shorelines._

_It’s Kanaya who breaks the silence again. “You don’t mind about me and Rose?”_

_“What? Why?” you ask, although you’re gratified that she would be concerned about it. “I want you to be happy. And like, it’s not like I don’t get the appeal.”_

_“I just thought... I dunno. We were kind of together,” Kanaya says. “And I liked that, but if we’re together I can’t go back to being your moirail...”_

_You snort in laughter. “Oh come on, you think I don’t know that? You think I want that? But seriously, who has time for quadrants anymore. There’s almost none of us left, and it didn’t do any of us any good when we had enough to fill a grid. Let’s just be happy.”_

_She pauses a long moment, and then nods, slowly. “I guess.”_

_“I don’t guess. I’m sure,” you say._

_“You should talk to Terezi, too,” she says, climbing to her feet; the rope bridge swings, but not as much as you might expect from such an ephemeral structure. “If that’s how we’re playing this. Anyway, I think she was as much your moirail as I was.”_

_She walks off, and you wake up._

 

It takes a good long while before you have the conversation you _need_ to have with Terezi.

Now that everyone is settled in, she’s not avoiding you so much; sometimes you’re more or less friends again, even. Not friends like you had been, but she’s more guarded with everyone now, and you try, you really try, not to take it too personally.

But as she relaxes around the group, you’re terrified that you’re going to ruin it all again, and you put off the conversation. Things are going pretty well, all told. Rose is a lot more fun to be around when she’s not drunk, and not putting a name on how things are with you and her and Kanaya seems to be working.

Kanaya is brilliant, you decide, the first time that Rose pulls you into the pile of cushions with the two of them. The humans are so much more physically affectionate than most trolls are, both of them; it takes some getting used to, sure. But maybe there’s a reason their species doesn’t usually have moirails, you think. The way that Rose and Dave behave, around each other and around you and Kanaya, Terezi and Karkat, you can’t imagine humans have much problem with skin-hunger.

Not that they’re indiscriminate, once you take the time to watch their patterns. Dave doesn’t seek you out much and is friendly but not handsy with Kanaya; Rose banters with Karkat when he can be drawn out, but she seems to intuit that the stubby-horned boy has an unusually broad area of personal space, even for a troll. Both seem happy to be around Terezi, though, and that makes you even less inclined to approach her.

Dave will roughhouse with her and build things and draw things; Rose consults with her over Paradox Space navigation, drawing out Mind-aspect insights over Terezi’s own obvious doubts, brushing shoulders and hands and occasionally hair as they stand close together over the charts. And if Terezi’s more subdued than you remember her being as a kid, she seems happy enough.

Kanaya sees you watching Terezi and Dave from the other side of the block, and frowns, and you’re sure she’s remembering your dream conversation; but she doesn’t press the issue. And you can live with that.

Gamzee is still very scarce; the lot of you had kept careful tabs on him for a few weeks but then, not so much. Too much effort to keep track of where he was and what he was doing if he was loose; too distasteful to keep tripping over him if you tried to confine him. You think maybe Karkat talks to him, sometimes. You’re ok not knowing for sure.

 

You would have preferred to not think about the clown at all, actually.

But even your luck doesn’t hold out indefinitely.

 

Your little group doesn’t use most of the available space on the meteor; even the areas you do use have long stretches of empty corridor to them, and pockets connected to the main complex by transportalizer where you aren’t really sure where they’re actually physically located.

And one afternoon, you turn a corner and he’s there.

Gamzee has grown; well, most of you have, it’s been at least half a sweep you’ve all been on this meteor and while conditions are all wrong to provoke a proper metamorphsickness or secondary pupation, you’re still growing in the manner of juveniles, slowly and steadily. Some less slowly than others. The last time you’d been able to properly size up the clown, he’d been about your height; now – you aren’t going to guess at numbers in the narrow hallway, but he’s definitely taller than you, skinny, but long in the arms and legs and horns.

Running away is beneath your dignity, but you definitely take a step back as he swings around to face you. His expression is mildly blank for a moment, as if he’s having trouble placing you. His eyes start to change from gold to orange, and it’s really eerie to see those eyes in such a placid face.

“You’re the one what all killed him,” he says. He almost sounds confused.

This is not a confrontation you want. Gamzee’s always been hard for you to get a good grip on, but you’re a lot better at this sort of thing than you were last time you tried to mess with him, and you start to reach out to stun him or confuse him or something -

And terror closes in behind your eyes as your own abilities slip out of your grasp. He grins, rolling his head lazily on his neck, as you take a wholly involuntary step backward, and another, and trip and fall on your ass.

“You think – YOU THOUGHT – you was the only motherfucker as has skills? As has any helpful dead of your sign with has knowledge of the skills to pass along?” he says, advancing slowly, and your throat may as well be made of ice for all you’re able to answer him back. “You been playing, I seen you – SOME OF US HAS A MOTIVATION TO DO MORE ALL THAN PLAY, SEE?”

You’ve never apologized to anyone for Tavros’s death. You’ve hardly acknowledged it. There’s some corner of your mind that’s saying that’s as it should be, and a rather larger portion that would confess, would beg forgiveness and mercy and whatever else might be the alternative to a death you’re suddenly sure would be Just, if only you could get your throat to work, and you hardly hear the sound of footsteps coming up behind you.

In fact, the clown is nearly as focused on your little drama as you are, and when he looks up, it’s slowly, with dawning incomprehension; you gather just enough of your wits to look up as well, and find a thin, gracile blade pointed at Gamzee over the points of your horns.

“We don’t do this kind of thing anymore,” Terezi says quietly. Her hand is shaking, slightly. Her voice is not.

“She snuffed him right the fuck out,” Gamzee snaps. “Wasn’t sure which of you sisters it was at first, on a fucking count of all the fucking chalk! But you didn’t up and kill each other like all I hoped, and now I know it was her alone anyway.”

“And we know what happened to Equius and Nepeta!” Terezi says, stepping around you; you scramble backward until your shoulder collides with the wall and you stay there, stay down, your mind too full of fear that you know isn’t yours but still can’t do anything about. “We know you’ve got all the corpses hoarded away somewhere! And we _still don’t do this anymore_ , Makara!”

He bears his teeth at her – since when does he have _that_ many teeth? - but she stands firm, and you wonder whether he has trouble with her mind, too, or if she’s just got a vertebral column of solid steel.

“Go,” she says. “I won’t kill you but I don’t want to have to do anything else to you, either.”

Finally – slowly – he turns and goes and the chucklevoodoos fade from your mind and you wonder how long you’ve been crying, heavy cerulean tears and raking sobs. Terezi’s still got her weapon to hand, but she drops to her knees at your side, and wraps her free arm around your shoulders. You turn to her, burying your face in the front of her shirt.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t think he was still hunting,” she says, holding you. “I thought he’d just kind of self-exiled, if we need to we can find some way to keep him penned up -”

That’s all a good idea, as far as you’re able to process good ideas, but right now you don’t need good ideas, you just need comfort. You ball your fists in her shirt, and you feel your way at the edges of her mind; it’s less guarded than you expect, less than you remember, and you make her stop talking about Gamzee.

“...Ok,” she says, and you’re pretty sure she knows what you just did, but she doesn’t sound upset so you don’t care if she knows. She puts down her sword-cane, and carefully cards her fingers through your hair, and the two of you stay there until you’re able to catch your breath and she pulls you to your feet.

“Kanaya said you were lost,” she begins, a little timidly. Timidity isn’t like her, and you’re not certain what she means.

“...knew where I was, just didn’t expect-” you object, and she laughs sadly, shakes her head.

“No, like, figuratively. She was worried.”

“She’s a meddler,” you say dourly. Your fingers are still intertwined with Terezi’s.

“She’s a pretty good one,” Terezi points out.

And at this point, you can’t really argue with that, can you?

 

_Aranea’s Land of Trellises and Treatises isn’t much like your Maps and Treasure, or like Rose’s Light and Rain, which you’ve visited in bubbles a few times, but there’s still a definite_ feel _to a Light Hero’s land that puts you at ease. Of course, in this case it’s just an approximation cobbled together out of the memories of Aranea and those of her friends who spent much time on Lotat, but still. There’s a rightness to it._

_The hive is a mid-game build, much higher than any standard hive would be, but not yet the truly impossible spire that it would need to be to even think about finishing the game, and you find Aranea on a balcony cobbled together from trellises about halfway up. She smiles at you as you fold your wings and come to stand at the rail next to her._

_“I need to know how to block chucklevoodoo,” you say, after a moment._

_She looks thoughtful. “I can show you a few defensive techniques,” she replies. “I don’t think I’ve ever actually tested my mettle against Kurloz, though. We have neither any true enmity, nor any particular camaraderie...”_

_You bite your lip for a moment, frowning at the horizon. “Well, that sucks.”_

_“Is Gamzee presenting problems already?” she asks, and you blink at her._

_“Already?”_

_She shrugs. “We don’t see a lot of him in the dream bubbles, really. He doesn’t seem to particularly enjoy the company of other people, or of his own doubles? But when he’s active, it’s almost always... unfortunate. I would suggest limiting interaction between him and your Pyrope, if possible.”_

_“Terezi? Terezi handles him better than I do,” you say. It seems like it should be hard to admit, but you find you’re actually proud._

_Aranea smiles, a sweet smile that you suspect is mostly for show, but you can’t help find gratifying anyway. “Then she’s in a stronger place than her doubles.”_

_“I’m trying to look out for her. Her and Kanaya and Rose,” you explain. “Take care of them. Make sure I have someone around who cares about me.”_

_Your dancestor pats you on the hand, and although the gesture’s a little patronizing, it’s also entirely approving, so you find you don’t mind, much. “That’s all we can ask for, isn’t it?”_


End file.
